Why the hardest skills in leadership are the ones we've typically called soft

The U.S. Army in the late 1960s distinguished competencies for machinery operations from competencies for people management. Hard skills involved operating and repairing equipment such as tanks and radios. Soft skills involved inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, and handling social responsibilities. The original intent was to delineate mastery requirements rather than rank skill types. Over time, the distinction shifted into a hierarchy that treated people-focused work as less important. Leadership difficulty often lies in what has been labeled soft, making the mislabeling costly. Parenting experience can serve as a practical model for these people-management skills, which can later improve workplace management.

"In the late 1960s, the U.S. Army made a distinction between the skills necessary for machinery operations and those used in service of people management. Hard skills, as the Army framed it, were the competencies that involved working with hardware-operating tanks, repairing radios, or what the lead researchers Paul G. Whitmore and John P. Fry called "weapons of aluminum and steel." Soft skills, on the other hand, were the ones that involved working with people, such as inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, and other social matters."

"However, somewhere between then and now, this delineation became a hierarchy, where the half of the work that didn't use machinery somehow lost half of its importance, despite Whitmore and Fry's intentions. This might very well be one of the most consequential misnomers of modern work because, in fact, the hardest skills in leadership are the ones we've spent 50 years calling soft. So, we invited Dr. Becky Kennedy onto the latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast to help us appraise the value of soft skills, and tally the cost of undervaluing them."

"Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and the founder of Good Inside, one of the largest parenting platforms in the world. Her work in parenting provides a useful proxy for the application of "soft skills" in management. As she reports, Good Inside members who join the community to manage their three-year-old's tantrums, for instance, often realize months later that these same skills helped them become better managers in their work."

Read at Fast Company